David
Horowitz, the ex-Communist and former Black Panther groupie turned stereotypical
right-winger, has kicked off his pro-war "Think Twice" speaking tour
of college campuses on a rather bizarre note. The "red diaper baby" who
morphed into a neoconservative went to the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill and gave a strangely disjointed and vehement rant 
directed not only at the antiwar movement but at the Chancellor of the University,
James Moeser, and the school itself: "I can't find words to express my contempt
for the chancellor and this University for supporting these views." Pretty
gracious, eh?

'THINK
TWICE'  OR ELSE

Without
citing anyone in particular, Horowitz went on to characterize the views
of unnamed antiwar professors and students at UNC as "jumping up and down"
in glee as the World Trade Center burned. As usual, the implication that
the "treasonous" activities of antiwar student groups and professors ought
to be shut down was implicit in his complaint that antiwar teach-ins took
place at a taxpayer-supported institution. Apparently, only "patriotic"
activities  such as his "Think Twice" tour  ought to be permitted.
Even the moniker he has attached to his campus blitz is shot through with
ominous overtones: students had better "think twice" before they openly
oppose the war  and get their name on a list.

A SINISTER
FIGURE

Horowitz
was always a dubious character, but, post-9/11, he has become positively
sinister  and also somewhat out of it. According
to reports, his tirade against UNC-Chapel Hill included a denunciation
of Moeser

"for
considering a proposal to establish a UNC-CH campus with an undergraduate
business program in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, which he said is
led by 'an Islamic radical.'

"'There
are no human rights [in Qatar]  not only for homosexuals and for women
but for anybody who disagrees with the sheik,' Horowitz said."

A RADICAL
ISLAMIC STATE  WITH A US BASE?

Gee,
that's funny, but I could've sworn that was an American military base being
hosted by the "Islamic radical" ruler of Qatar  reputedly the largest
American base and arms depot outside the United States. When a lone
gunman opened fire outside the Al-Adid air base, near the capital city of
Doha, he was shot and killed by Qatari soldiers. Qatar has long been in
the American camp, cravenly
praising the presence of US and British troops for "protecting the Arabs
from each other," as Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad Bin Jasem al-Thani put
it in an interview with al-Jazeera television. Qatar was good enough for
the World Trade Organization to host a summit there in November of this
year: why isn't it good enough for UNC-Chapel Hill?

AN OASIS
OF MODERNITY

Horowitz
paints a grim picture indeed of life in Qatar, but the
US government tells a different story altogether in its official human
rights report card. While not exactly a Western-style democracy, Qatar,
alone among the Gulf states, does have elections to a consultative body
in which women
are allowed to vote: as Thomas Friedman points out in the New York
Times, Qatar, like other small states on the periphery of the Arab world,
is among the most
modern and socially progressive of the Muslim countries. Another Qatari
idiosyncrasy is a media relatively free of censorship and government control.
Extra-judicial killings, torture, disappearances of political dissidents
 these routine features of life in many Middle Eastern countries (including
Israel) are entirely absent from Qatar.

LAND
OF THE (RELATIVELY) FREE

The
US State Department 1999 Country Report demonstrates that life in
Qatar is not much different from life in these United States, at least in
certain respects: "The law prohibits arbitrary arrest," we are told, "however,
the police have the discretion to arrest persons based on a low level of
suspicion, and arbitrary detention in security cases remains a problem."
Sound familiar? Perhaps John Ashcroft is modeling some of his own methods
on the Qatari example. "Suspects who are detained in security cases generally
are afforded access to counsel; however, they may be detained indefinitely
while under investigation. There were no known recent cases of incommunicado
detention." Unlike John Ashcroft, at least the Qataris release the names
of their detainees.

If
there is any really brutal political repression in Qatar, it is directed
primarily against Islamic hard-liners, such as Abdulrahman
Al-Nuaimi, a Ministry of Education official who distributed a letter
to the press critical of the Amir's decision to allow women to vote and
run for office in the Municipal Council elections. This is a "radical
Islamic state"?

AN IGNORANT
DEMAGOGUE

Horowitz,
as usual, is running off at the mouth and demonstrating his complete ignorance
of the facts. But facts don't matter to a demagogue whose frenetic posturing
has turned him into a caricature, a living parody of his own invented persona.

But
there is, in this caricature, a lot that is revealing. In his "The
Art of Political War," a pamphlet devoted to strategic questions,
Horowitz urges conservatives to lay off the complex arguents that make them
sound like debaters at the Oxford Student Union and appeal directly to people's
emotions:

"But
the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are
entirely different.... You have only thirty seconds to make your point.
Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach
(the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention)
would not get it. Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest
would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure
of daily life. You will never have time for real arguments or proper analyses.
Images  symbols and sound bites  will always prevail."

GAMES
PEOPLE PLAY

In
other words, emotionalism will always prevail over reason  and the
latter is not a Horowitz ally, in any case. Doggedly pursuing this emotionalist
strategy, Horowitz seeks to channel and manipulate the inchoate anger of
potential recruits by blatant appeals to racial prejudice, hopped-up rhetoric
that is always in a white heat, really over-the-top abuse of his political
opponents (he has lately been using obscenities in his editorial replies
to letter-writers)  and mindless computer games that resemble an Orwellian
Two-Minute
Hate. His last one, "SlapHillary.com," gave players an opportunity
to smack around a favorite hate-object, and now SlapOsama.com
has been set up along the same lines. You can slap Osama with a pile of
camel dung, target him with a missile, subject him to airstrikes, or go
all the way and nuke him. Just about what one might expect of someone who
disdains "real arguments or proper analyses" in favor of "images,
symbols, and sound-bites."

WAR
PROFITEER

But
as even one sympathetic visitor to the site pointed out in a posted letter,
"Although I love being able to exercise my emotions on the head of
OBL repeatedly, I somehow am not too fond of the idea of the 'unending'
game, that the head pops back every time." But that is precisely what
excites Horowitz and his fellow neoconservatives  the idea (or hope)
that the "war on terrorism" is unending. Perpetual war
means endless government subsidies to their big business patrons, as well
as the unlimited opportunity to demonize, spy on, and purge their enemies
from public life, with a little assist from various law enforcement agencies.
It means perks, privileges, and prestige for the laptop bombardiers, and
full coffers for the merchants of death; enormous profits for certain business
interests, and a continuous flow of tax-exempt contributions for Horowitz's
"Center for the Study of Popular Culture." If ever a law is passed
against war profiteering, Horowitz should be the first one carted off to
jail.

As
this clown takes his road-show from campus to campus, reveling in his self-generated
notoriety as a shrieker and would-be "treason"-hunter, he is clearly looking
to the authorities to take action against campus-based antiwar organizations.
While calling for "free speech" against the intellectual conformity of left-wing
political correctness, he berates UNC-Chapel Hill for "allowing" antiwar
teach-ins at a state-subsidized institution. Clearly, in his view, such
activities ought to be banned.

HOROWITZ
EXPOSES HIMSELF

We
must defend to the death this idiot's right to make a fool out of himself
in public, and not only on general principles of free speech, but as a strategic
move: The more he speaks, the more he discredits himself. If the sinister
"Think Twice" tour gets to your campus, what you need to do is let this
jerk expose himself for what he is  with a little help from you and
Antiwar.com. You can assemble your own "David Horowitz Truth Kit" by downloading
the following printer-friendly files and distributing them to interested
parties. Get the lowdown on Horowitz here:

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